Godzilla Lessons Learned

By: Steve Ryfle
Date: Thursday, November 16, 2000

Did anyone else notice an interesting interview with Dean Devlin that showed up a few days ago on IFILM (www.ifilm.com)? Not that Devlin is anyone's favorite genre-movie auteur (in case you don't know, he is one-half, along with director Roland Emmerich, of Centropolis Entertainment, the people who brought us big-budget dreck like Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Patriot), but the piece makes for an informative read because Chris Gore is the first interviewer to get a semi-straight answer out of Devlin as to how he royally screwed up the King of the Monsters two years ago.

Dean Devlin is a lot of things: writer, producer, ex-actor, soon-to-be director (his debut will be the Larry Cohen-penned Cellular, multimillionaire, and crapmeister. He is also a spin-doctor of the first order, with an ability to create great hype for his films well in advance of their release. But in the months after Godzilla was released to a monster critical drubbing, especially from the hard-core 'Zilla fan circles, Devlin's public-relations skills seemed to falter. For the longest time, whenever he was asked how he could have missed the mark so badly, he said the biggest mistake he and Emmerich made was not screening the film for a test-audience; the time constraints of post-production and the looming release date made it impossible to do a last-minute fix-it job. Well, what was he going to do, cut cub reporter Maria Pitillo and that annoying Brooklynite ('I was gonna axe you something') entirely out of the movie? Hey, Dean: 'It's the script, stupid!' And the one you wrote wasn't worth saving.

Time heals even the deepest wounds, and Devlin now feels more comfy talking about one of the biggest misfires in movie history. Kudos to Gore for laying it bare in front of Devlin, and making him answer for his crimes. 'I think there's a couple things we did wrong,' he saysthe understatement of the century. 'We had made a decision early on not to anthropomorphize the creature, not to give him human-like qualities. We wanted him to just simply be this large lizard, this thing that had grown up and was just trying to survive... If we had decided early on that our Godzilla was going to be a sympathetic creature, I think our ending would have worked better. I think the audience would have known how to react to the scenes. You didn't know if you were supposed to be scared of Godzilla, or root for him... There's a phenomenal chase scene in the movie that really broke new ground special effects-wise. These helicopters are chasing Godzilla through the city, and, just on a technical level, it's really fantastic work. But emotionally when you watch it, it's cold, because you don't know if you're rooting for Godzilla to get away or if you're scared that Godzilla's going to kill these guys in the helicopter.'


Later, discussing the differences between King Kong and his monster film, Devlin incriminates himself: 'King Kong is a love story...a tragic love story. So, you had a very clear way of telling the audience how you're supposed to feel about events that are going on around you. With Godzilla, we were having so much fun with the joke of it that we really didn't give you a rooting interest. I think that was by far the biggest mistake.' The joke? If Devlin thinks Godzilla is a joke, then why did he take the job? Oh yeah, the money, and the chance to show those Japanese filmmakers how it's really done.

Thankfully, the faithful folks at Toho don't consider their beloved beast a joke, and the latest Godzilla movie, Godzilla X Megaguirus, looks serious as all hell and much better than the recent Godzilla 2000, as evidenced by the just-released trailer.

In the interview, Devlin is also taken to task for all the scene-stealing he and Emmerich have committed, particularly in ID4. 'At the time Star Wars came out, people forgot that it was in itself a tribute to all the films of George Lucas' childhood... That's really what Independence Day was for us,' he says. 'The tributes in the movie are not hidden. It's not like we're trying to pretend it's not influenced by other films. In fact, we directly reference a lot of the movies that we were paying tribute to, because in essence that's what Independence Day was.' Uh-huh.

AND ANOTHER GODZILLA THING ...

Did anyone else notice that signature Godzilla music in Charlie's Angels, in the scene where the girls are approaching the castle in Carmel to rescue Bosley (yeah, right, like the plot matters)? It's composer Akira Ifukube's horror motif, straight outta Toho, with some hip-hop beats going on. The song isn't on the movie soundtrack album, so what gives? It's 'Simon Says,' by rapper Pharaohe Monch, formerly of the group Organized Confusion. If you're interested, check it out on his 1999 album, Internal Affairs (Napster, anyone?).